Ethereum's Hidden Gas Budgets: 38% Goes to Permanent Storage
Correction, 2026-07-17: I treated a research allocation model as a physical state-growth meter. That was wrong. The model puts every residual SSTORE charge into
gas_state_growth; in the cited block range, 25.0% of that assigned gas came from transactions with no net-new final storage slot. The current tables also expose unsigned-wrap rows that make the broad resource percentages unsafe. I am retracting the 38.6% permanent-storage headline rather than inventing a replacement. The full source and storage-diff audit is here.
There's a simulation running on every mainnet block that almost nobody talks about. EthPandaOps built it. It watches every EVM opcode across every transaction and asks a question the current gas price deliberately ignores: what kind of resource is this gas actually paying for?
The answer changes everything about how you think about gas pricing.